


Caligula

by Marasa



Series: Neon Dream [1]
Category: Twenty One Pilots
Genre: Anxiety, Bullying, Emperor - Freeform, King - Freeform, M/M, Neon - Freeform, Opium, Panic, Period Piece, Role Reversal, Roman Times, Rome - Freeform, Sex, Vaguely sadomasochistic, Vaguely sub/dom, emotionally devoid, hmm, josh is his servant, mentioned drug use, new technology in old times, old meets new, or is it the other way around, tyler is an emperor
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-11-08
Updated: 2017-11-08
Packaged: 2019-01-31 01:02:56
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,545
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12665091
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Marasa/pseuds/Marasa
Summary: Tyler is regarded as the Neon King. He rules a Neon Palace. He creates a new sun. He lights a new life.





	Caligula

Tyler is feared.

He rules a kingdom of beautiful architecture and wondrous drugs grown in sun-kissed fields but more so, he believes it is the light that he surrounds himself with that makes his power known.

It comes from the far East, where snowy mountains meet the ocean. Trapped in glass tubes and stuffed into sacks that are a camel’s carry on, they make their way across many other kingdoms on a trading route headed west.

When it arrives, no one has ever seen anything like it. It is a new power, a new faith. It is a tube that glows as bright as the sun in colors of the most beautiful stars deep in the universe.

It goes by the name, ‘Neon.’

Tyler demands five thousand shipments from the cusp of where the empire that called themselves Russians meets the empire of those by the name of Chinese.

He orders the ground be ripped up and wire to be buried so that his new lights, like deities, could be fed with the electricity they needed.

He orders every wall of the palace, inside and out, to be embedded with neon light. Every room glows pinks, blues, greens, yellows. Outside, his palace shines like the dreams of God, a beacon of blinding light in every shade of vibrancy.

Tyler is regarded as the Neon King. He rules a Neon Palace. He creates a new sun. He lights a new life.

They fear him like they fear God.

His people love him.

He makes them scream in bed.

His hair is sweaty and his mind is absent of real thought other than instinct. He's sore, grinding, bruises forming along his hips where they slam into whoever is beneath him.

The aquamarine bars of light bent in the stone of the wall in front of him in a spiral pattern pulse and pull him in, lighting each drop of sweat of the body he's inside of to look like Neptune.

They're faceless.

They don't matter.

Tyler does not love his people like they love him.

Brat, his critics call him.

Over-sexed, horny, vicious, mind warped with light that is dirty and not of the sun.

He indulges in the wealth of his empire. He eats fat feasts and lets the poor waste away. He smokes opium and does little to fix the corruption forming in the council. He murders three people daily, thieves, traitors or the innocents that just happen to bother him in mundane ways.

No one calls the palace colors ‘annoying’ anymore.

A twenty-one year old blacksmith calls the palace and the lights adorning it annoying and atrocious and other nasty names. She is promptly left hanging from a noose tied to the top of a high wooden pole that is nailed mockingly with strings of neon light of every obnoxious color that does not work well together.

‘ _Perhaps this will help you understand just how beautiful my light shines_ ,’ Tyler's hand-written note attached to the side of the installed pole reads. ‘ _Enjoy the light; you’ll feel like royalty too whenever it glows.’_

His crown is off but he feels more royal now that neon blue light assaults his front, pink to his left, red to his right, black that glows fuzzy purple behind him.

Tyler’s working hard here in bed, gasping, swearing, enjoying the tightness. It's all building. He swears the lights around him swell in intensity as his own erection swells.

Heat explodes out of him, hips going frantic against the ass below him. He tilts his head all the way back so that his vision is overrun with black light. It makes the whites of his eyes, the teeth of his blissful smile, glow.

His vision clears the second after he cums.

He's blinking around him to the other bodies that crowd his bed. They're all gasping too, moving against each other, wet mouths, wet groins, glowing skin.

Tyler stands on his knees in the center of the bed, dick slipping out of the body beneath him. Neon light from his left mixes with his cum, makes it look like drops of pink candy on the sheets.

Moaning buzzes in his ears almost as loud as the light. He's disgusted with all of them.

“Get out! Get out!” Tyler’s screams echo in the huge room. “Leave! Get out! GET OUT!”

They don't bother throwing on their tunics. They run out and into the hall naked, shame flopping against their chests and between their legs.

Tyler falls on his ass in the center of the bed and glares at the door long after they disappear. The yellow bars that line the wood make his eyes water but he keeps his eyes trained on them out of spite.

His expression falters as the door opens. He then returns his glowering when one of his servants peeks his head inside.

“I brought you water,” Josh says. He holds out a cup through the crack in the door as proof.

“Enter,” Tyler growls.

Josh- one of the many servants that occupies the palace. Dark hair, toned body, beautiful face. Tyler would have liked him underneath him tonight and every other night.

He would never want to admit wanting to sleep with one of his servants, though, so he keeps his mouth shut and his desires hidden.

“Fetch me my glasses,” Tyler orders before he guzzles down his water. Josh goes to a nearby jewelry box and pulls out a pair of tinted glasses, white frames and black lenses.

He'd rather wear glasses that make him look like a bug than turn the lights out.

The lights never go out.

They make his skin sick and his eyes water and his vision blur and deteriorate.

Tyler slips his glasses over his eyes. The lights never, never go out.

“You were in here quick, almost as if you were listening, waiting,” Tyler says as he finishes his drink. “Eavesdropping on me, pervert?”

Josh smiles like Tyler is the pervert for wishing that were the case.

“I could have you murdered for smiling at your ruler like that,” he spits. “Disrespectful louse.”

Josh reaches out to take the empty cup of water from him. Tyler throws it at the wall. None of the red neon bulbs pops, thank God, but the cup shatters.

“Perhaps a bath?” Josh asks. The broken glass behind him doesn't seem to affect him.

“I want to stew in the filth,” Tyler growls. “My dick’s already half-hard. The smell of sex will do well to make me cum again.”

Royal potency, his claim at such a quick refractory period is a subtle gesture of masculinity and raging testosterone, strength.

Josh glances at Tyler’s crotch. His dick is limp.

“You've sealed your fate, pervert!” Tyler stands on the bed in his wave of outrage, bare feet on the sheets, glasses on his face, drying sweat and cum on his deflated dick glittering in the neon light.

“How embarrassing for you,” Tyler hisses as he looks down at his beautiful servant. “Reason of death: Looking at your emperor’s dick. What will your family say?”

Josh sighs.

“They're dead,” he says. “You killed them when you ordered your men to burn down the lavender fields to make room for your electricity generator or whatever.”

He had been drunk and pissed off that night. His palace wasn't bright enough. It's bright enough now. But however bright it is won't bring them back.

“Oh.”

Tyler sits back down. His ass cheeks squelch against cum-covered sheets.

“Do you want me to change your sheets?” Josh says. Tyler shakes his head.

The smell makes him feel less alone. It's a reminder someone was there when his bed turns cold and the lights on the walls make him feel panicked.

He fishes into the drawer of his bedside table. He finds his pipe but doesn't find any opium.

“Fetch me opium. I'm all out.”

“There's none, your highness.”

“What?”

“The next shipment will be delivered in a few nights time,” Josh says. “The last we heard, it is on the trading route, making its way across the desert as we speak.”

Tyler’s hands twitch. He takes off his glasses to rub at his eyes.

“Fetch me yours,” Tyler says. “Go to your quarters right this instant and give your emperor your opium stash. That is an order.”

Josh’s lips pull into a smirk. “I don't smoke.”

Tyler grits his teeth until his jaw is aching. He knows this is the truth as Josh doesn't cough like him or stumble through the halls half-asleep.

How well he is makes Tyler hate him.

“I will be the one to kill you, Joshua Dun,” Tyler says seriously. “I will murder you and send you back to your pathetic parents.”

Josh steps forward, intimidating. Tyler looks up, frightened.

“You don't mean it, Tyler,” he says lowly. Tyler’s eyes widen, no matter how much the light burns him. “Why don't you mean it, Tyler?”

No one calls him Tyler. Josh does. Whoever calls him Tyler shall perish but Josh is still here and they both know he’ll be here for a long while.

Why doesn't he mean it?

Tonight has him feeling strange.

Tyler stands from the bed. It's Josh’s turn to sit down. He doesn't act like the cum underneath his ass bothers him.

So calm, so collected- Tyler wishes he was more like Josh.

He wanders to the wall opposite the bed where his vanity stands against the wall. It glows orange against the blacklight wall.

He looks at himself in the mirror. He's sweaty, dirty. There are deep bruises on his skin and bloody scratches from anonymous fingernails.

He looks more of a peasant than those he sticks his dick in.

He looks more of a peasant than Josh.

“You could be the emperor,” Tyler muses. His eyes drift from the mirror because he can't stand to look at himself anymore. “You're pretty enough for them. You’re nicer than me. You're what they would want.”

Tyler picks up his crown from where it sits on a silk pillow on the vanity. He turns it back and forth. It reflects every light shining around it.

There's a heavy black box no larger than the palm of his hand nailed to the back of it. He toys with the switch on it but does not turn it on.

“It's the cruelty of life that is the reason that I am where I am and you are where you are,” Tyler says. “We’re not that different. Our luck is the only thing that greatly differs. In another universe, maybe, you're the emperor.”

Tyler turns to him. He strides over to the servant he's closest to, the one he can't stop thinking about. He stops in front of the servant he calls his even though he's never touched him or made him gasp underneath him.

Tyler places the crown atop Josh’s head.

His finger trails down the length of the small neon lights wrapped around it till he hits the box at the back. He flips the switch. The crown glows with color- red, blue, purple, yellow.

Josh doesn't break eye contact with him.

“Be emperor,” Tyler says with a coy smile. “Play pretend with me. C’mon.”

Josh looks at him, unreadable. He stand suddenly, crown bright and eyes dark and Tyler suddenly doesn't feel like the emperor anymore.

It's insane how quickly the lights that line the walls turn on him, how his own crown looks foreign. He falls back on the bed, naked and squirming in discomfort as Josh, the disgruntled servant turned emperor at a moment’s notice, towers above him.

“You filthy, depraved lunatic,” Josh growls. Tyler flinches. “You disgrace to our great land. You pollutant, you disease, you sex-fiend.”

Josh leans over the bed over him. Tyler cowers beneath him, curling in on himself. Tears well up in his eyes, muscles trembling. It's hard to decipher what is pretend and what is truth.

“The people you have killed curse your name in the shadows. You will burn in Hades for the sins you have committed. There is no hope to teach you to be human,” Josh says. “Tyler, they will call you an abortion, a failed existence.”

Tyler cries. Josh is the emperor now.

“Tomorrow!” Josh cheers so loudly that it booms in the criminally empty room. Tyler slams his palms over his ears. “We will hang you from the highest tower of this ancient palace you have defiled.”

“No!”

“Yes!”

Josh laughs, the glowing lights of the crown reflecting crazily in the servant’s eyes. “We will bash five-foot neon bulbs against your back until you’re bleeding the colors of your obsession. We will stick one down your throat until your sputtering burning liquid of blue and red and purple.”

“Please-”

“Your people will consume you, Tyler, they'll extinguish your light and this kingdom will never assault their senses ever again.”

Josh sneers. Tyler weeps under him.

“I swear it, for I am emperor now and you will perish by hanging atop your own palace, with a flexible rope of neon light that glows the same shade of red as your insatiable thirst for sex and violence, Tyler!”

“Please, stop!”

“We’re going to kill you!”

“Stop!”

“AHHHH!!!” Josh screams less than an inch away from his face.

“STOP, STOP!” Tyler wails.

It goes quiet then.

The lights continue to hum as they drink up invisible electricity deep in the walls and far underground. Tyler continues to cry.

Josh takes off the crown and looks down at his emperor who shakes and whimpers in panic and fear.

“I'm joking,” Josh says, emotionless. It sounds strange, creepy, how he can say it so monotonously after such an emotional act. “I was only playing pretend, Tyler. Like you wanted me to.”

Tyler’s bottom lip trembles. He has trouble breathing and he keeps hiccuping pathetically. He feels ashamed at his nakedness and cups a clammy hand over his sticky cock, trying to hide himself from his emperor’s gaze.

But Josh isn't Tyler’s emperor.

So then why does it feel that way?

“It was pretend,” Tyler whispers to himself. “Just pretend.”

“Pretend,” Josh says. It sounds threatening.

Tyler stares at the glowing green ceiling as he hears solid steps walking toward him. A buzzing crown glowing harshly is laid on his sternum.

“I'll go get you some more water,” Josh says. “And I won't change the sheets. They'll be dirty by tomorrow anyway.”

Josh leaves then and Tyler feels so abandoned. In less than ten minutes, a servant has become his emperor. Even without the crown on, he feels like Josh is glowing with power, authority down those halls, in the servant’s quarters.

It's just luck, who they’ve become.

Tyler gets like this sometimes- crazy with the light and the lack of opium in his aching body. Tonight just has him feeling weird; it means nothing.

Tyler stares at his crown on his sweaty chest and knows that he doesn't really mean it.

His head throbs, his nose drips, his body feels cold and vulnerable. He doesn't feel the way an emperor should.

The neon light decorating his crown burns every sick color that exists in the world. Tyler glares.

It brings him pain but the lights never go out.


End file.
